The Roots of Republican Racism

Its been a bit more than two weeks since Dylan Roof murdered nine members of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and the questions of racism and white supremacy continue to reverberate. Certainly, as the President suggested in his eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney,  the last thing Roof thought (assuming he had a thought) was that his murderous act would ignite a debate that has seen --- finally  -- a recognition that the battle flag of the Confederacy --- the Stars and Bars  -- is a continuing simple of hatred and bigotry that no longer has a place in today’s world.

What his act and the ensuing national discussion has also done is expose a seemingly incomprehensible resistance of the Republican Party and those running to be nominated as the party’s standard bearer in 2016 to acknowledge that racism continues unabated in this country. That the media has so blithely passed over the refusal of any of the Republican candidates and the bulk of the party to  offer this acknowledgement is not surprising…the media having long ago surrendered its responsibility as the fourth estate. What remains surprising is how dedicated  Republicans and their candidates are to their denial of anything that even remotely suggests or admits that racism continues. Discuss the issue and you are immediately accused of “playing the race card” or injecting racism into the nation’s politics. A white supremacist murders nine black people because “you rape our women” and the Republican response ranges from calling it “an accident” as Rick Perry did to blaming the victims for having brought it on themselves as did one of the officers of the NRA. None, however, admitted that the act was an act of racism or, as importantly, that the act reflected a deep and unrelenting problem in this country that needs to be addressed.

I understand that the historic roots for the current Republican agenda are tethered to the very issues over which the Civil War was fought. The current battle cry of a small federal government and the rights of the individual states to decide for themselves how they should be governed were the very fundamental issues over which the War was fought. There is no doubt that slavery was a central issue over which the war was fought but not the reason why those first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861. That War, at least at first, was not fought to enforce a moral imperative but to bring to heal southern states and, more accurately, the southern aristocracy which controlled the southern economy and refused to yield to a central federal government the fruits of that economy. Slavery was integral to that  economy and thus became intertwined with the roots of the rebellion and the federal governments efforts to counter that rebellion. While Lincoln certainty should be credited with pressing forward first with the Emancipation Proclamation and then the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution and for ultimately bringing to an end the institution of slavery the purpose for his doing so, however well intentioned and despite its consequences, was first and foremost an effort to destroy the southern economy, put an end to the conflict and bring the southern states back into the Union.

While the strategy worked it nevertheless left open wounds which continue festering to this day. Though slavery itself has long since disappeared the attitudes that made slavery possible and as natural to the southern elite as breathing continue as does the belief that despite the outcome of the War the southern states should nevertheless be allowed to decide for themselves how they should be governed without deference to a central, federal government. The “States Rights” cry continues unabated to this day and has over past thirty years or so become the cry of a Republican party which seized upon that undercurrent of dissent to devise a strategy for turning the south, which had historically been dominated by Democratic legislators and voters, into bastions of Republican dogma.

While the southern economy has long since shifted somewhat from agrarian to industrial the issues of self-determination by those states remain and continue to drive the discussion about the size and strength of a federal government. By seizing upon this one fundamental issue – the demand for the right of self-determination –  the Republican party has succeeded in gaining support from those individuals who are most in need of a strong centralized government that can and has provided subsidies for food, jobs, education, infrastructure and security. The incredible result is that tens of millions of southerners vote against their own self interest by siding with a political party that has flexed its political muscle by awakening the ghosts of those plantation owners who so long ago controlled the southern economy and fought the federal government to keep the fruits of slave labor on the backs of poor southern whites who fought under the banner of the Stars and Bars.

Having successfully pressed this strategy in the south I suppose it is understandable, at least from an intellectual standpoint, that the Republican party would resist any pressure to acknowledge that what they are actually supporting when they stand with those southerners still lamenting loss of their “way of life” is a way of life built upon the backs of black slaves and the attitudes which fostered that way of life. While support for that way of life has waned in southern urban centers it remains alive and well in the rural south where those populations are most vulnerable to a "the-South-will-rise-again" pitch because educational opportunities have been reduced by Republican governments that press for smaller governments at the expense of those most in need. With such fertile grounds to conquer, the Republican party continues to press a fight over long-since resolved grievances and, in so doing, finds itself standing with those who continue to long for a way of life which has long since passed from our national experience.

Perhaps it is this alone which drives the Republican refusal to acknowledge that the racism which sprung from that way of life still exists fearful that by doing so it will lose the support of this “base” which it has worked so hard to cultivate. Perhaps it is also its many patrons who continue to pour tens of millions of dollars into campaign strategies that continue to target these states as essential to any strategy for regaining the White House.

Nevertheless, all intellectual conjecture aside, it is beyond reason and understanding why the party of Lincoln, of all people, refuses to acknowledge that which is so obvious. In the long run, any hope of overcoming justified perceptions of who and what the Republican Party represents demands that acknowledgement be made. Until then is certainly no hope for reasserting its moral compass and if successful in regaining the White House no hope for the country.